After creaking in on crutches to her office in the High Energy Physics Lab, the only female tenured Harvard professor in the physics department plops herself at her desk in front of pictures of Wonder Woman, modern art and all the undergraduate women in physics sporting warpaint on their faces.

In preparation for a photo, she stands on one foot, waves her other leg in the air and exclaims, "I'm just going to go with the flow here."

Indeed, Franklin has been going with her own flow all her life.

A popular professor known for her free-spirit and energy, Franklin says she was largely independent as a kid in the '70s. "I did pretty much what I wanted to do," she says. "That was the time when all possible things could happen."

Unlike her older sister and brother, Franklin never attended a regular high school because she says she thought the long classes were stultifying and not conductive to learning.

"I didn't understand how I could learn everything in 40 minute intervals, instead of studying something as long as I wanted, for maybe two hours," Franklin said.

Rather than join the public school system at age 13, Franklin largely taught herself for two years by reading books with friends off the streets in her hometown of Vancouver, Canada.

"I can remember exactly how I met them. They were really interesting," Franklin recalls. "They were reading something by [James] Joyce."

This alternative "school," made up of about 100 teens, was eventually accredited by the city school board. Franklin says she was able to learn high school math in a few months in this alternative learning environment and still keeps in touch with her "classmates" from those years.

Franklin, whose parents both worked in the media industry, says she first became interested in physics when she picked up a physics book at a friend's house. "It was something by Heisenberg, I think, about different atomic models," she recalls.

The book prompted her decision to attend college to study physics, though she didn't find success initially. Franklin's physics grade after her first year at the University of Toronto was a C. But intelligence didn't seem to be the problem. Franklin just wasn't used to studying.

"I had the idea down that I was supposed to go to lecture, but I didn't understand you were supposed to study by yourself or take notes," she says.

Franklin says she was fortunate enough to find a physics professor who was on the same wavelength as her and shared her embrace of the unconventional. She spent hours in his office solving physics problems. He later went on to become a Sufi dancer, while she went on to become a particle physicist.

Franklin says she first got interested in particle physics as an undergraduate during the summer working at the Forelimb in Chicago, site of one of the largest particle colluders in the country. She has helped put together detectors and measure the results of collisions ever since.

Franklin came to Harvard as a junior fellow in 1987 and was tenured in 1992.